Posts published in “Idaho”

If you’re in favor of higher education - and today that includes some but clearly not all voters - then the general election had one definite bright spot in the Idaho Panhandle: The voters’ choices to fill three seats on the North Idaho College board.

Count it as something in the Gem State to be thankful for this season.

The college has been teetering on the edge of losing accreditation, which could mean in effect the end of the college. This is not a subtle threat or much in dispute, or unimportant. The college’s future was hanging in the balance with the choices voters made to fill three critical spots on what normally, in most years until recently, has been an obscure governing body. Community college boards are quiet and publicly obscure - like a lot of offices in government - as long as they stay out of trouble.

North Idaho College has no inherent massive problems. There’s nothing about its teachers or students or administrators or facilities or the other people (vendors, community partners) raising any red flags. It long has operated like a normal community college, offering some collegiate courses and some aimed at vocational and technical training. Not terribly contentious there.

Until the Kootenai County Republican organization decided a few years ago to turn the non-partisan board into a culture war battlefield (and in campaigns, vivid apocalyptic imagery). With the support of that organization, which for a couple of decades has been politically dominant in Kootenai, new members were elected to shake things up at the college.

Shake them they did. Their tenure of control, which has extended over not all but most of the last four years - since voters in November 2020 elected a majority which set about demolishing normal practices at the college - has been a time of chaos and uproar at the college, with fired presidents and attorneys and others and a wider mix of key players, some evidently quite capable and others evidently not. The college was in endless uproar for years, and the reason was easy to point to: The elected board.

Finally the regional organization that accredits colleges stepped in and warned that the college’s credentials, which translates to the usefulness and recognition by the outside world of its education program, was at imminent risk of being lost.

That finally seems to have gotten the attention of Kootenai County voters. Not all of them, and far from enough to constitute a landslide at the polls, but enough to change the membership of the board in a direction aimed at restoring the college’s conventional role as a community college.

The stakes were public enough in the last couple of elections, but this year they finally moved front and center, ahead and in front of the bogus culture war topics that dominated so much local attention in previous cycles.

The slate of candidates trying to save the college ran under “Save NIC Now,” and the campaign language was blunt: “They aren’t here to play games; they’re here to clean up the board and get NIC back on track. If you care about NIC and the future of this community, these are the folks you need to vote for.”

It worked.

On November 20, the newly-elected board members, Rick Durbin, Eve Knudtsen and Mary Havercroft, were sworn in amid applause and no doubt deep relief. And they got to work right away on starting to repair the damage from the last few years.

This isn’t the end of the story. Word on ensuring accreditation continues will go on for months, as the accreditors move toward their final decisions. But the odds of success have improved.

What happened politically in Kootenai County could blunt efforts in other parts of the state to take other colleges down the same road NIC traveled. Attempts in southern Idaho were turned back a couple of years ago; thanks to the voters at Kootenai, they may have a harder time gaining traction in future. Maybe some broader lessons will sink in too.

Something to be thankful for, we can hope.

 

Transgender people have been big in politics this year, in Idaho and nationally.

They became a top battleground focus of the winning presidential campaign (especially in television ads from the Trump campaign in battleground states), and in the most recent Idaho legislative session they seldom went unremarked for long in heated debate. Transgender people have become a culture-war centerpiece in the state.

Idaho’s congressional delegation joined in the fray this month, “sending a letter today urging the Mountain West Conference to ban biological males from competing in women’s sports and protect biological female student-athletes.” This being such an obvious federal issue and all.

In September, Attorney General Raul Labrador joined in a letter from attorneys general around the country blasting the American Academy of Pediatrics (these are the leading professionals in health care for younger people) for their policy “Ensuring Comprehensive Care and Support for Transgender and Gender-Diverse Children and Adolescents.” A decision by a professional association so obviously meriting the use of state tax dollars …

From all that, a visitor from afar understandably might think a massive crisis on this subject has suddenly arisen.

They would be wrong.

Before going further, answer in your own mind this question: How many transgender people - what share of the population - do you think there are in Idaho, and in the nation?

Compare what you just thought to these results in a survey of American adults by the polling firm YouGov: “The average response was 21%, or 1 in 5 Americans. This overestimate was not an outlier, as respondents consistently overestimated the size of other minority groups, guessing that 27% of people are Muslim (the reality is 1%), or that 41% of Americans are Black (the reality is 12% to 13%).”

Okay: So what are the real numbers?

According to the Williams Institute in California, which has most thoroughly researched the subject, the nationwide number is about 1.6 million, well under one percent of the population.

In Idaho, the transgender number was about 7,000, or .52% - that’s just about half of one percent - of Idahoans. That’s in a state of two million people.  The numbers in Idaho are well below the national stats, which are not massive to begin with.

The numbers are generally reported as skewing somewhat higher for younger people; attitudes toward gender issues may be a factor in how some people see and act on their gender identity.

Presumably, one hardball political calculation is that if you want to Otherize a group of people for rile-up-the-base purposes, this is a group of people who are too small in size to cast many votes or exert much social influence. Of course, what would that say about beating up on people who can’t easily fight back?

It’s true that there are some legitimate subjects for discussion here. The issue of who should participate in gender-specific athletics is real and legitimate. I’ll not weigh in here specifically on whether the athletes complaining about transgender participation in their ranks have a case; maybe they do. But that ought to be qualified by individual cases. Every one of these transgender people are stories unto themselves. The changes they go through as well as the results are different, on varying time frames and involving different physical realities. A transgender person in one case might in no way reasonably belong on a particular gendered team or group, while another might. Wouldn’t that suggest the smarter way to go would involve addressing these issues case by case, with the specific facts at hand, rather than in making a sweeping judgment?

If the numbers involved were really large, you might argue that broad rules are needed. But, well, the numbers aren’t all that large. The Williams Institute and others have estimated that about 1,000 Idaho teens are transgender.

In general, a case by case approach probably is going to yield the best and fairest results. Doing it that way would, of course, result in less raw meat for the political and anger/fear social media grinders, but … wouldn’t that be a good thing?

There’s no cause for panic here, however extreme an emotional response political ads, and some politicians, might try to induce.

 

All those signs around Idaho calling on Idaho voters to not “Californicate” Idaho - this being a prime argument against the passage of Idaho-based Proposition 1 - contain a massive irony.

Who do you think provided a lot of the winning margin against the proposition?

That’s right: Almost certainly, a lot of people who have moved to Idaho from California.

Directing your attention to a web page on the site of the Idaho Secretary of State’s office (a good page on a good site, by the way, that keeps on getting better) which provides detailed statistics about voters who have come from out of state and registered in Idaho. The page has specific numbers for the two decades leading up to about a year ago, so you can derive not perfectly precise but solid current data from it.

The top line alone is remarkable: Since 2004 (up to about a year ago), 118,639 people from all of the other states have moved to Idaho and registered to vote. In a state of about two million people, that’s a lot, enough to be seriously game-changing on election day.

On the right in Idaho, this is often presented as threatening: People coming from a lot of liberal states, California especially but a lot of others too, and on the verge of turning Idaho blue.

Not happening. California is in fact the largest contributor of immigrants to Idaho, but bear in mind that while the majority there votes blue, in that big state there are still a lot of Republicans, even after the many who have left. (Just as you can still find liberal Democrats in Idaho, sometimes without even looking all that hard.)

Of all those nearly 120,000 immigrants from other states over a two-decade span, 65% have registered in Idaho as Republicans, and just 12% Democrats. There’s also the 21% who are unaffiliated, but it’s a fair guess that at least half of them, and probably more, are Republican-leaning.

By far the largest group of them came to Ada County, and it’s one of the least-partisan cohorts among the immigrant groups in the state, just 59% Republican. In contrast, the immigrants to Kootenai County, the largest recipient area, in the Idaho panhandle were 71% Republican.

There is no county in the state, and there is no home state for the newcomers, and no  year since 2004, where Republicans were less than the largest segment of immigrants. Idaho, statewide, has been attracting Republicans far more than anyone else. In only two counties, Blaine and Teton (the resort counties), did Democrats even come close to  matching the Republican numbers among newcomers. (Republican incomers were most overwhelming in Jefferson County, just north of Idaho Falls.)

But none of that is the most striking news the webpage holds:

This immigration pattern has been accelerating.

If you look at the last four years of immigration, the number totals 67,478 - about a fifth of the 20 years accounting for more than a third of the total number of immigrants. The percentage of Republican registrants during that time: 64%, about the same as the 20 years overall, but with larger numbers impacting the Idaho electorate.

In roughly four years previous, there were just 31,237.

And in the four years before that, there were 11, 235. (Republicans accounted for 72% of that cohort.)

So this has been a picking-up-steam element in Idaho elections, as long-time Idahoans have formed an ever-diminishing part of the electorate, and it has increased the dominance of the Idaho Republican Party leadership, the Idaho Freedom Foundation, and allied groups - and specifically the defeat of Proposition 1.

Is there specific support for that? Sure.

It’s as simple as this: Look at the Ada County elections website and check the results for Proposition 1 on the precinct map. The fastest-growing areas around Ada County and those clearly drawing the most people from out of state, including Meridian, Eagle, Kuna and Star, are also the places where the ballot issue was defeated the hardest.

Apparently Idaho already has been Californicated.

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On October 24 the Idaho Department of Education announced, and appeared to encourage, a new option for Idaho public schools: “supplementary resources from PragerU Kids, available for use free of charge.”

Gee, sounds wonderful.

So what’s the catch?

If you get the impression, which you easily could get from the state press release, that PragerU is just a milquetoast, academic, centrist, non-ideological supplier of educational materials, think again. Here’s where it helps to take a national view, because PragerU has become familiar, and highly controversial, in other states.

First some background: Dennis Prager is a conservative radio talk show host, not an academic, and “Prager University,” founded in 2009 as a nonprofit, is not a school and does not have a campus. It is a large-scale operation, one of the biggest “political spenders” on Facebook. The Los Angeles Times reports that, “The concise videos PragerU launches onto the internet every week to indoctrinate and motivate conservatives have been watched more than 2 billion times.”

Where does the money to do this come from? The core funding was from Texas billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks, who made their bucks in fracking, and may be familiar to Idahoans who recall their purchase of tens of thousands of acres of land in Idaho and the subsequent cutoff of access in much of it. If you were wondering about an Idaho connection to PragerU, there you are. (Prager has said he no longer receives money from the Wilks.)

So where else has the (abundant) money come from? Here’s one small example. In 2022, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported, “A Hungarian education foundation paid Dennis Prager $30,000 in public funds for two appearances during an August youth festival where he and Fox News host Tucker Carlson touted the country’s far-right stances on the media, immigration and LGBTQ issues, according to a contract obtained by Hatewatch.”

Prager, in turn, has called the SPLC “a hate group on the left.” Not exactly a love fest there.

A year ago Forbes magazine, no liberal agitator, said: “PragerU, a nonprofit known for producing short and often controversial videos promoting conservative viewpoints of different civic topics, had its content approved for use in Oklahoma’s public schools Tuesday, about a month after Florida adopted the use of the content in its own classrooms, prompting backlash over its presence in public classrooms.” Backlash is a mild way of putting it.

Sociologist Francesca Tripodi studied Prager and concluded with a warning that, “the implications of creating a dense network of extremist thinkers allows for those who identify as mainline conservatives to gain easy access to white supremacist logic. Leveraging the thoughts of someone like Stefan Molyneux can have disastrous consequences considering that Molyneux regularly promotes ‘alt-right’ ‘scientific racism’ on his own YouTube shows.”

One very popular video (watched 11 million times) from conservative Candace Owens is called “Playing the Black Card,” in which she says, “The black card will still confer upon you an entire history of oppression, even if you have never been oppressed. With the black card you can sell books full of indecipherable prose because with a card that powerful, who cares if your words make any sense?”

The PragerU YouTube channel has featured a video showing Christopher Columbus saying slavery was no problem and George Floyd was simply a  “Black man who resisted arrest.”

Even the Weather Channel has blasted PagerU’s take on the environment and climate change as “misinformation.”

The Media Bias Fact Check site gives PragerU a rating of low credibility: “Overall, we rate PragerU Questionable based on extreme right-wing bias, promotion of propaganda, the use of poor sources who have failed fact checks, and the publication of misleading information regarding immigration and climate change.”

And there is much, much more. Look ‘em up online (or on Idaho Ed News). You have to wonder if the state’s top education office did.

Coming soon, very possibly, to your child’s classroom.

So, in the interest of fairness and balance, when does Bernie Sanders get to run a video series in Idaho schools?

 

Across the border in Oregon, voters this fall are considering whether to approve a ballot issue that would set up a statewide system of ranked choice voting. The bases of support and opposition for that idea are a lot different than they are in Idaho, where voters are about to make a similar decision.

The Oregon measure was developed and put on the ballot not by an independent group, but by the legislature - the same governmental organization that in Idaho (in its majority at least) is fiercely in opposition to it; although in Oregon, it is Democratic legislators who are in favor, with most Republicans in opposition.

But Republicans are not alone in opposing the Oregon measure. So are quite a few Democrats, who point to flaws in the plan. Unlike the Idaho issue, it wouldn’t change the strict party registration requirements for voting in primaries. (In Oregon, only people registered with a party get to vote in that party’s primary election.) It also would set up two entirely different ranked choice systems for statewide candidates and for local offices (those choosing to use ranked choice, which could result in a local government patchwork). And - this is the real red flag for a lot of people - the legislature exempted itself from ranked choice voting.

Ranked choice voting, which has as a hoped-for end result the election of candidates who have support from a majority and not just a thin plurality of the voters, can be done in a lot of different ways. Some of them are complicated.

Others are not, and the ballot proposition Idaho voters will decide on election day is not very complicated at all.

It is similar to the system in Alaska, which has worked generally as intended and seems to have general satisfaction in the state. That level of popularity will be put to the test with a repeal proposal on the ballot, but early indications seem to favor ranked choice. So far it seems to have resulted in the election of candidates, of both parties, with broad appeal.

The battle over ranked choice may be fiercer in Idaho than anywhere else, though. The state Republican Party organization is solidly lined up against it, and some several key legislators have spoken about killing it if the voters should dare to cross them and pass it.

The higher intensity in Idaho probably has to do with the more focused political stakes. In Oregon and Alaska the effects of ranked choice voting are more scattered and less targeted.

In Idaho there is a target: The hard-edged and highly ideological group that has taken over much of the Idaho Republican Party, including its statewide leadership, and many of the Republican seats in the Idaho Legislature. As columnist Jim Jones has written, in this year’s primary election alone a long list of mainstream Republicans, including the Senate president pro tem, lost to the more extreme alternatives in races where only about 10%, or fewer, of the registered voters cast a ballot, which allows people on the political fringe to dominate the results.

The theory of the case is that if more voters were involved in the choices, candidates who are more centrist would win, not all the time, but more often. A change along the lines of the proposal on Idaho’s ballot may, in the short haul, be the only way to make that happen.

If it does, be aware: This is not a solve-all.

Ranked choice is like late in-person canvassing in intensive elections: It can matter where elections are already close, within a percentage point or two or maybe three, but not if the margins are already wide. It won’t create a win for a candidate who otherwise would have lost in a landslide. It will not upend all of Idaho politics.

But it would bring more people into the decision of who will, given the state. If the number of Idahoans who participate effectively in choosing their leaders in a primary is closer to a third than a tenth, and if the eventual winner has to generate appeal across a larger group of voters in the general election, that has the sound of moving closer to “government by the people.”

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It’s the traditional question - ever since the 1980 presidential campaign, at least, courtesy of Ronald Reagan - posed by at least one side in the campaign:

Are you better off than you were four years ago?

Even though there’s a severe limit to how much any single public official can make individual lives better or worse - and in the best of times, some people fare badly, and vice versa - at any point in time, the question isn’t bad.

What’s tricky about it is that our memories often mess with us. Go back a few years, and things tend to look better than they did at the time.

I can help with that.

Every week, for a lot of years now, I publish something called the Idaho Weekly Briefing, and it includes a rundown of what happened over the previous week, using news items, statistics, press releases and what have you. The idea is to give a picture of what’s going on at the moment, a snapshot of sorts.

So here are some excerpts from the look at Idaho the week of October 19, 2020, along with a little additional information.

I wrote then,  “Candidate debates, including several for congressional offices, worked their way into news reports last week alongside the ever-present stories about Covid-19, which features reports of a strong pandemic resurgence in the state. Good news: wildfires eased back, and were much less noticed last week.”

Covid-19 was highly active - no vaccine for it had yet been released - and “As of October 17, Idaho health officials reported 52,582 cases of Covid-19. They were spread across all of Idaho’s 44 counties. This week’s increase was about 5,000 cases, more than last week and by far the largest in Idaho for any single week.”

Covid killed thousands of Idahoans, and many businesses were either damaged or shuttered completely, owing in part to then-erratic messaging from Washington.

Governor Brad Little opined, “This is about personal responsibility – something Idaho is all about. Wear a mask. Watch your distance from others. Wash your hands. Do these things so our kids can stay in school, our loved ones stay safe, and our economy can continue to prosper … Hospitals throughout the region are experiencing the highest number of hospitalizations due to COVID-19 ever seen throughout the pandemic. This is placing a significant strain on hospital resources.”

Crime rates in Idaho were very similar in 2020 and in the most recent year for which full numbers are available, 2023,  though numbers have been dropping according to a number of reports since.

The Department of Justice announced it has charged 60 defendants with firearms-related crimes during Fiscal Year (FY) 2020, despite the challenges of COVID 19 and its impact on the criminal justice process. U.S. Attorney Bart Davis said “We have a great impact on curtailing violent crime by focusing our efforts on the enforcement of federal firearm laws. Through our partnerships, we are ensuring that those that contribute to gun violence face appropriate charges and sentences that will protect our community.”

In 2020 wildfire season “was slow to start this year in Idaho, and now is slow to depart.” The National Interagency Fire Center reported 10 active wildfires in Idaho (about the same as this year).

In 2020 growth in the state's seasonally adjusted labor force increased September's unemployment rate to 6.1%, up from 4.2% in August. (The most recent 2024 report, for August, is 3.5%.)  And: “Total benefit payments to laid-off Idahoans attributed to COVID-19 have reached $889.5 million.”

Inflation rates nationally then and now were close to the 2% level federal regulators consider optimal. (High inflation is harmful but so would be no inflation at all, for the economy generally and anyone with debt, such as a mortgage or on credit cards.)

The stock price for Micron Technology was 51.61 (now 106.92), for Hewlett Packard 18.50 (now 37.01), Idaho Power 87.11 (now 101.09) and Clearwater Paper 40.01 (now 27.76).

Boise okayed a water management plan, and Nampa’s library started window dropoff service. An Idaho State University team was researching blue whales.

Am I better off now than four years ago? Sure am. Not everyone is, of course. Life goes on, and aside from Covid-19 and all the aspects surrounding it - a big aside - things seem to be rolling along much as they had been.

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Even in Idaho, debates can matter. You might check in on that with Dan Foreman.

Foreman, a Republican from Viola, is the state senator for the district including much of Latah and Nez Perce counties. He has been highly controversial through his public life, and in his four general election percentages in runs for the Senate generated less than spectacular results for a Republican: 50.1% in 2022, 49.6% in 2020, 43.9% in 2018, and 50.8% in 2016.

Meaning that he’s probably not been coasting to an easy run for re-election, against Moscow City Council member Juliia Parker, this year. The numbers may be close enough that what he said at a near-debate - actually a candidate forum, but close enough - might matter.

According to several people present, Foreman addressed another candidate (not his opponent), disagreeing with a point she was making (on racism in Idaho, from her perspective as a Nez Perce Tribe member) and then proceeding to confirm her point by telling her to “go back where you came from.” Foreman has denied making the statement. Apparently, the event was not recorded.

Which may be a good reason to get all these things on video - and to watch, and attend, them.

For decades, televised debates have been a standard for Idaho politics, and television and sometimes radio across the state routinely has offered a score or more debates every campaign season, for major offices and often including state legislative and other posts as well.

That tradition has been weakened in recent years. First District U.S. Representative Russ Fulcher, for example, has declined to debate his Democratic opponent, saying, “To sign up for a debate would be the single largest contribution they would have, and I’m not in the business of campaigning for my opponents.”

But the object of a campaign debate is not supposed to serve as an advantage to one side or the other. It is supposed to advantage the voters, who may get no other opportunity to see the contenders side by side, and counterbalance the often nauseating tsunami of paid-for materials. The strategic strength of one candidate against another should not be a consideration.

You can test that proposition for yourself, in a more disinterested way, as I do every election season, on one of the few cable news channels I bother to watch.

If you have cable TV (or even if not, if you have streaming) you can find many of these debates on C-SPAN, the cable news service which simply and plainly presents the events as they occur, with external and extraneous commentary kept to a minimum or foregone completely. You get to evaluate what happens for yourself.

Many presidential-level debate events (not all: it depends on the host) are available there. I find more interesting the lower-level debates C-SPAN also provides, including congressional and statewide offices, and a smattering of others as well.

This week, for instance, on Monday night alone I watched debates between the major parties' nominees in the Pennsylvania 7th, Minnesota 2nd and Nebraska 2nd congressional districts. The Nebraska contest may be one of the closest in the nation (that district covers urban Omaha), and the debate between the candidates was a good example of civil but hard-fought. The Minnesota debate featured one of the most skilled debate performances, from an incumbent, I’ve ever seen. On Wednesday night there was a hot debate for the U.S. Senate seat in Arizona. You can learn a lot about what constitutes a good or poor debate performance, and about how to evaluate issues, by watching these candidates who you don’t know.

But you can learn a lot more. These candidates sometimes get into purely local subjects, but often they’re talking about much the same things candidates elsewhere - such as in Idaho - would be discussing. If you hear candidates from some other place discussing, say, social security or immigration, you may come away with some fresh insights.

You can also learn this: If these people in other states can bestir themselves to debate, maybe those in Idaho can do it too. And as Dan Foreman could probably tell you, something might come of it.